Remains of the Day: Fool on the hill

Yes, yes, it’s April Fool’s Day. But here at the Remains of the Day, it’s business as usual. So you can read about non-resellable MP3s, rumors about the next two iPhones, and Tim Cook’s handsome, handsome yearbook photos without any fear that we’re out to fool you. That’s because the remainders for Monday, April 1, 2013, respect everything about you.

A U.S. District Judge ruled over the weekend that users cannot resell songs they bought on iTunes. The case between Universal and service ReDigi has been going on for a while, but this judgment could mark the end of the line. So you may in fact be stuck with that one ill-advised Taylor Swift song you purchased. Forever.

That’s the sentiment from Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese for whom Steve Jobs worked as a young man in the ’70s. (At Atari, not Chuck E. Cheese.) “To most potential employers,” Bushnell writes in his new book, “he’d just seem like a jerk in bad clothing.” To the rest of them, however, he’d probably just seem like a jerk in a fancy turtleneck.

During an interview about mobile device theft, San Francisco District Attorney George Gascón said that he had a conversation with Apple’s government liaison in which he learned that the next two versions of the iPhone have already been developed, and in fact “preceded Tim Cook.” Wait a second, if I’m reading this right, then those iPhone models may have actually created Tim Cook.

Speaking of Apple’s head honcho, a post on the Chinese version of Apple’s website is said to contain an apology from Cook about issues with the company’s product warranties in China. Cook laid out new warranty policies for the iPhone 4 and 4S, which will reportedly see faulty units replaced with new ones rather than simply repaired with new parts. In other news, who knew Tim Cook was fluent in Chinese? (More fodder for the robot theory!)

Well, this would seem to poke a hole in that Tim Cook-is-a-robot theory, huh? A Redditor whose mother attended high school with Cook posted pictures of the future Apple CEO from the school’s yearbook. Cook was apparently lauded as “Most Studious” and worked on the yearbook. Absent, however, is the smoking gun of “Voted Most Likely to be Replaced by an Advanced Robot Replicant.”

Dan Moren Contributor

Dan has been writing about all things Apple since 2006, when he first started contributing to the MacUser blog. Since then he's covered most of the company's major product releases and reviewed every major revision of iOS. In his "copious" free time, he's usually grinding away on a novel or two.More by Dan Moren